Lexmark S305 printer ink cartridges

The Lexmark Impact S305 wireless 3 in 1 inkjet printer is sold with standard capacity Lexmark 100 ink cartridges, these cartridges are all rated at less than 200 pages and do not represent good value. When buying replacement cartridges for this printer, we recommend purchasing the high yield 100XL ink cartridges, rated at up to 600 pages. These cartridges will produce the lowest cost per print and will also mean you will have fewer changes of cartridge.

 Lexmark Impact S305 printer review

The Lexmark Impact S305 features a fairly simple design, with none of the extra paper trays or document feeders of the more costly models in the range, yet it still has several useful extras.

The paper feeds from a fold-up tray at the back with a tiny spring-loaded flap in the front that no one seems to be able to explain the reason for. We once thought that it was to avoid dust slipping to the feed slot, but even when the tray is fully loaded, there's still a big gap between the paper stack and this flap.

The Contact Image Sensor (CIS) scanner is straightforward and thin, so adds little to the overall height of the machine and runs its full width, so there is no extra room taken by a control panel. The control panel is placed at an angle projecting from the front of the machine, similar to all those new Lexmark all-in-ones. It features a simple, mono LCD display, though this is bitmapped, rather than being two lines of 16 characters, so can display limited graphical information.

Set into the front right-hand corner of the machine are two memory card slots, but there's additionally a PictBridge socket for direct camera connection, which can take USB drives.

Despite the quite low price, the Lexmark Impact S305 printer retains wireless connection and also a USB socket at the rear. Wireless set-up is pretty straightforward and the machine supports WEP, WPA and WPA2 security. It comes with a good bundle of support software, including a copy of Abbyy Finereader OCR.

As you may expect from a machine with the same print engine as others we've recently tested, speed test results are also virtually identical. Our five-page, black text print took 54 seconds to complete, which is a speed of 5.55ppm, but this increased to 6.86ppm when we printed the longer, 20-page document. The five-page text and colour graphics test took 1:21, a speed of 3.70ppm. These results aren't impressive at all, however it does sit in the center of field for Inkjet MFP's in this price range.

Print quality has never been a strong point of Lexmark inkjets, however this dramatically improved with the introduction of the new individual-ink Vizix engine.. Black text prints are now generally clean and sharp and colour business graphics include some arresting colours, even on plain paper. Colour copies are refreshingly near to the originals they're taken from.

Also improved is the standard of the photo prints, a lot less dotty because of the improved dither patterns and with good amounts of detail in light and dark regions of each image. Colours are lifelike and natural, without veering towards the bland.

The Lexmark S305 printer ink cartridges can be purchased in two capacities and as return programme or non-return programme versions. Utilizing the larger yield, 100 XL return programme variants gives a cost per ISO black page of 4.13p, with 10.13p for an ISO colour page. Even though they are lesser compared to before, there is nonetheless about a penny higher per black page as well as a couple of penny greater per colour from their several competitors.

At below £100, we're surpised with the capability of the Lexmark Impact S305 ink printer. It uses the same core print technology as Lexmark machines costing three times the amount and the new Vizix print engine shows its paces just as well in this cheaper model, generating much better than average plain paper print and much better photo print than before. With a fantastic set of data ports as well as wireless connection as standard, this machine stands its ground against its main rivals.